Holden Commodore once again Australia's best seller, with a catch

In a classic case of good-news versus bad-news, the Holden Commodore has once again managed to retain the title of Australia's best-selling vehicle in 2008. With this announcement, the Australian arm of General Motors has extended the Commodore's run as best seller to 13 straight years. That's the good news part. On the other hand, its 51,093 sales in 2008 are the model's lowest total since it first debuted in 1978. That, as you may have guessed, would be the bad news part.

Australia's second-best-seller is the Toyota Corolla, and the compact from Japan put up a very strong fight to wrest the title from Holden. There were a few main factors that eventually put the crown back on the Commodore, including the introduction of the Sportwagon bodystyle (above) and the October launch of Holden's $29,990 (AUS dollars) driveaway deal. Fuel prices also dropped towards the end of the year, and that likely helped swing the momentum back towards the Holden from the more fuel efficient Corolla. 2009? Time will tell.

We get it. Ads can be annoying. But ads are also how we keep the garage doors open and the lights on here at Autoblog - and keep our stories free for you and for everyone. And free is good, right? If you'd be so kind as to whitelist our site, we promise to keep bringing you great content. Thanks for that. And thanks for reading Autoblog.

Here's how to disable adblocking on our site.

Click on the icon for your Adblocker in your browser. A drop down menu will appear.

Select the option to run ads for autoblog.com, by clicking either "turn off for this site", "don't run on pages on this domain", "whitelist this site" or similar. The exact text will differ depending on the actual application you have running.